Rabbi Schneider - Choose to Rejoice, Give Thanks and Pray
"Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In everything, give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus". Pray without ceasing. In everything, give thanks, for this is God's will for us in Christ Jesus: to rejoice always, to pray without ceasing and to give thanks always.
Beloved, God wants to elevate us out of the power of darkness, out of the natural world, out of the power of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil into simply standing in him and standing on truth. How do we elevate ourselves? How do we ascend out from the darkness, above the darkness, so that we can walk on this world, walk on the power of darkness, even as Yeshua walked on the water? We do three things.
Number one, no matter what's happening, we choose to rejoice. How do we rejoice? We choose to give thanks. We choose to be thankful. We choose to say, "God, you don't deserve anything less than me being happy because of you". I'm not saying that we're always going to feel emotionally happy, but I'm saying that we resist the spirit of bitterness. We resist complaining, and we realize that we don't deserve what we have. We don't deserve any of it.
So we need to thank God, rejoice and pray without ceasing. How do you pray without ceasing? You talk to God about everything. You talk to God about everything that's going on in your mind. You share all your innermost thoughts with him, involve him in the inner recesses of your soul, in dialog through prayer and beloved, as we practice these three things, practice choosing to rejoice.
That takes strength. We're choosing what to focus on. We rejoice because we've got God in our life. We thank him for everything. We thank him that we have him. We thank him, that we're destined to go to heaven. We thank him that he causes all things to work together for good. You see me going like this? I'm swatting the mosquitos and gnats out of my way.
And then finally, Beloved, we cling to him by praying to him ceaselessly. When we do those three things, Beloved, we can be assured that we're walking down the path of life and we're going down the pathway that's going to be a path of continual ascension into victory.